Some of the most meaningful API work of my career was in government, including a stint as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, so I will give you both halves of this honestly.
The good is very good. OpenFDA is a genuinely well-built public API. The We The People API was the first modern read-write web API in the federal government and it mattered. There are agencies and city governments running APIs that are better designed and better documented than plenty of commercial platforms.
The average is not good, and the reason is structural rather than technical. Government APIs are typically funded as projects, launched with a press release, and then left without an owner, a support budget, or a reliability commitment. Availability is genuinely a concern — public services that developers are encouraged to build on go down and stay down. Administrations change, priorities change, and the API that a civic developer built a decade of work on disappears without notice.
The fix is not more mandates or better tooling. It is treating a public API as ongoing infrastructure with a named owner, a maintenance budget, an SLA, and a deprecation policy — the same things you would demand of a commercial provider you depended on. Where that exists, government APIs work extremely well.
